It’s all a gift from God. Everything. Every feeling, including the most excruciating, is equal to the most joyful and sublime. The situation that frightens you so is a gift you need not struggle to control, escape or avoid. Accept the gifts of God, the greatest of which is your freedom from having to control or resist any condition, internal or “external”.
What is an “external” condition? You see someone walking outside your home and consider that “external”. But where does that condition really exist, but in your awareness? It is all in your awareness, all internal.
There appear to be levels of internality. We can go deeper, examining feelings about that person we notice “outside” our home, for instance. We might notice ourselves envying him in some way. We can look deeper and see the insecurity about ourselves that this points to, and we can go deeper. We can see that his insecurity is based on an imaginary version of ourselves, an imaginary image or idea of ourselves as inadequate or inferior. Deeper than this we can see our assumption or belief in something going wrong in our life. And deeper than this is the assumption or belief that something can go wrong or be wrong in life. At a deeper level still we see how this is all based on illusion. We are projecting this illusion on the screen of reality which is unknowable.
Peace Abides Within
Beneath the level of any emotional turbulence that we may feel is a level of pure and perfect inner peace that we can faintly sense. It abides underneath any feeling of inner rippling of emotion. Sometimes that ripple turns into ripping waves of pain that tear through us. But the same steady, placid state of peace abides deep down underneath.
That peace exists in the awareness that observes the minor rippling as well as the major ripping.
How to find that haven of inner peace abiding so deeply with? Not by pushing away the feelings and thoughts and “external” events that seem to stand in the way, but by accepting what is as God’s Perfect Gift of Infinite Love and Infinite Intelligence.
This involves giving up the illusion of control, as well as the illusion of “better” and “worse”. See how much better you feel when you let this go, accepting and surrendering to what we can describe as the will of the inevitable.
I realize there was a contradiction there: “see how much better you feel when you let go of the illusion of better and worse.” Judging any feeling as better means that you are holding onto the feeling that feels worse. You must then start resisting one feeling and holding onto the other. This engages you in struggle against what is. Now you are trying to take over your life, trying to take it out of the “hands of God”. Here is where your suffering begins and true joy ends.
The Essence Of The Spiritual Path
Give up your personal goals and petty values. Drop your demands upon other people and particularly upon yourself. Surrender to the Higher Power in charge of everything and trust in Its Perfect Love and Wisdom. This is the essence of the spiritual path.
Stop taking credit and cease giving yourself the blame. Stop seeking credit, as if impressing your boss at work can bring you more security or any real gain. Stop giving other people the power they don’t have, which is to do anything of real value for you at all. They are puppets on a string, shadows on the wall. Your source is the Divine that gives you what you have coming to you right now, always perfect.
See Your Adversary
Are you experiencing an anemic joy-flow, peace-flow, love-flow, cash-flow? Don’t try to solve your problem; dissolve it! Dissolve the problem by relating to whatever is as your solution, your gift of God. This is the new way to problem-solve!
Do you see? Every aspect of your present situation is being worked out for you. Do you believe you do not deserve such Love? Do you feel guilty about something? Is there a part of you that wants to hold onto control and take the credit? See this entity as your adversary, the one holding onto the conflict between you and what is, the one that places you in opposition to your inner peace.
See it as your adversary, but do not oppose it. Accept the adversary as is. Remember, whatever is, is a gift of God.
Living The Path
Does this path seem too easy? If it does, you are not living it yet, only thinking about it. Is there anything more terrifying than the idea of giving up the idea that we are responsible for directing our lives? Can you trust in the circumstances that trigger off your terror? How easy do you suppose that is. Does this path now seem too hard? That perspective also indicates that you are not living it, because you are still standing on the outside, judging what you think it is.
Your life is not in your hands. Your life as it presently is comes to you by design. If you imagine another’s life to be better than yours, or another self to be doing better than you are doing, you are giving credit where credit is not due.
You are encountering what is just right for you right now, including your thoughts about the lives that you believe other people possess. Do you imagine another to be more blessed? Does that thought come with a sinking feeling of lost self-value within you? Do you imagine yourself to be more blessed than another? Does that idea bring up a feeling of prideful superiority and condescension that lacks compassion? See what comes up in you as the gift from God that you are being given to see.
Sure, when you trust God in all respects life feels easy. You feel the burden of the world lifted off of your shoulders. You feel carefree. But this feeling does not last. If you remain aware of your feelings you soon feel feelings of disturbance, unhappiness, criticalness, dread creeping back in. You find the fearful feeling within you that tells you that you must seize control of the situation facing you. You then must go through the process once again, relating to what you are going through internally and “externally” as a gift that you need do nothing about.
This process naturally turns whatever you have been feeling into love, appreciation and gratitude. These are the jewels of trust.
The Message Of Money
On every U.S. dollar bill we read the words, “In God We Trust.” What would happen if you paused to read those words every time you receive a dollar, and every time you are about to spend one? Do you even understand what those words mean? Do you believe in the message they convey?
They tell you to not trust in the power of money, but in the Power of your Source, that which brings your dollars and that which sets them free. Those words are telling you to trust the amount of money, and the sum of the bills, that you have as God’s expression of Perfect Love for you.
Isms
The part of you that is crying out for control is generating the illusion of the condition it wants so desperately to avoid.
All efforts aimed at personally controlling a situation express a false need and cause suffering.
Suffering is the product of resistance to the flow of life, to the Absolute Leadership of God.
Worry about your wellbeing is always unfounded and the cause of needless suffering.
You don’t have to do anything to take care of yourself but release your identification with the idea of your self being responsible for self-care.
You are always being taking along the right path for you, along which all of your true needs are blessedly met.
As all preferences and concerns with self-interest melt away you are awakening to the truth.
Love is always the way. A loving way is your true way. An unloving way is a way that you conflict with your authentic self-expression.
Your solution to every problem is to trust in God’s control.
The True Way
The True Way cannot be explained. At best we can make statements that effectively point toward it. But anyone can come up with a logical argument that makes an otherwise useful and valuable pointer-statement seem like utter nonsense.
There is no verbal statement that is absolutely true. One who awakens to a feeling of the truth represented by a statement is spiritually supported by that statement.
The True Way, the Way of Wisdom, is not altogether passive. You are always encouraged to do that which expresses, enhances and shares your true joy, inspiration and love.
When you face a quandary, seek God’s guidance by going into absolute inner peace. It is there that you will receive your pointer regarding what action to take, if any, to further or demonstrate the Divine Plan for you.
Dealing With Anxiety And Fear
If you’ve hit a wall of anxiety or fear in your quest for inner peace, accept that inner condition of turmoil as the Perfect Gift of God.
The first step for translating your anxiety and fear into pure is to simply feel what you are feeling; feel it fully and freely. Don’t treat fear and anxiety as something you need to push away or get away from. Don’t relate to it as something stronger or more powerful than you are. Calmly examine it. See how it tries to drive you into action, to get you to live under its command.
You will see that you are feeling insecure about making the wrong choice, doing the wrong thing, mishandling your situation in a way that would result in you having to suffer, to lose and to endure disgrace.
At a deeper level you will see that you are reacting to the belief that things can go wrong, that reality itself can be wrong, that you really do have something to worry about, that you need to be in control of the situation.
If you act under the influence of this level you end up making it stronger, more demanding. You are turning it into a more cruel and ruthless slave-driver.
The False Self
All fear and desire comes from a false version of yourself that believes in its sense of incompletion, lack and need. It believes that you would be in a better situation if you had more money right now, for instance, but that contradicts the reminder on every dollar that comes and goes. Relate to your current situation as just right for you and you live in security and abundance.
You have a true and a false self. Your false self is your fear-self and your desire-self. The fear part of the false self believes that something can go wrong. The desire part believes it needs to get something from someone, and believes further that it can get true satisfaction by getting that something. But operating under its influence only increases the emptiness and dissatisfaction that generates the desire.
The false self was formed by the psychological programming you received in childhood, consisting of the beliefs and emotional reaction patterns modeled around you, particularly in the first six years of your life. This is the self that believes it needs to be in control.
It’s chief driving influence is fear, fear of other people, fear of making a mistake, fear of what might happen. The false self drives you to take action that it hopes, expects or believes will protect it from what it fears. But taking this action serves only to perpetuate, sustain and strengthen the fear that you are giving power over your life. You are strengthening your fear by doing what it tells you to do to gain your freedom from it!
Let The False Self Die
Don’t act from the false self, but correctly toward it. Do this by being aware of it as it makes its emotion-charged demands within you, rather than by heeding those demands in an automatic, mechanical, slave-like and habitual way. This allows the false self to die, as it withdraws your power from it. In other words, this is the way out of fear and into the reality that is both true and perfectly safe!
What has just been described is a process of invalidating your fear. As you do this for yourself you are helping everyone else do it, because your influence, the influence of your state of consciousness, radiates and influences the state of consciousness of the entire human race. This is how you lead humankind to God Realization, to Love, to Safety.
You do not lead humankind to heaven with verbal teachings. You do it through your internal process of self liberation.
Freedom From Virtual Reality
This process is far from painless. It is necessary though. Denying your fear creates as much misery as letting it run you. In both instances your anxious, fearful state continues generating the virtual reality that your life is truly threatened, that God is either non-existent or not entirely powerful and loving, that your trepidation has a basis in reality. This means that you experience yourself stuck in the same problem, the same danger, in the same fear, no matter what physical actions you take to get out of it.
When your fear arises, that is God letting you know that the work that is yours to do is the work of removing your power from the false self and the problematic world it is creating for you. There is your solution.
Losing Attachments
When you feel anxious or fearful, look within to see what it is that your false self fears losing, what it feels emotionally attached to, what it believes it needs to be safe. When you see what these are, surrender them to the Divine. Descend into the deeper level of feeling that expresses to the Divine, “I trust you with or without these conditions in my life.”
If you simply allow yourself to feel the fear and desire of the false self without letting that fear and desire drive you into action or speech, you weaken it to the point that you can see its attachments and can then sink into a deeper level of surrender to the Will of the Divine, the way of the inevitable, with perfect trust.
Truth is love so you have nothing to fear. When you experience this you discover that it is really all that you want to experience, all that you want to feel. It is fulfillment. It is freedom. It is love.